Europe's hatred of American tech companies is caused almost entirely by American lobbyists who are trying to persuade the EU to use its powers to hobble other American tech companies.

One American lobbyist helpfully tweeted this fact today.

It sure looks as if Europe is always trying to put the brakes on innovation from outside Europe. Bird cites the EU's regulatory moves to investigate Apple, Google, and Uber for potential antitrust violations as examples of the way Europe always seems to want to stop American companies from doing anything cool if any European company might get bruised in the process.

Bird has good company. President Obama believes the same thing. In February, in a discussion of Europe's regulatory environment for tech, Obama said:

In defence of Google and Facebook, sometimes the European response here is more commercially driven than anything else. As I've said, ... sometimes their vendors — their service providers who, you know, can't compete with ours — are essentially trying to set up some roadblocks for our companies to operate effectively there.

This idea — that European tech "can't compete" and so the government puts up "roadblocks" — is nonsense.

Business Insider reported back in July 2014 that the EU had almost closed the book on that investigation when Yelp's lobbyists persuaded regulators to re-open their case. My understanding is that Yelp founder Jeremy Stoppelman has actually had dinner with some of the EC's highest officials in his attempts to make the case — which may have merit — that Google screws companies like Yelp by providing biased search results.

Yelp spokesperson Luther Lowe — an American — has spent a lot of time in London making the case that Google is an evil empire that needs to be curbed.